{"id":62916,"date":"2026-08-04T22:23:02","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T02:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/?p=62916"},"modified":"2026-08-04T22:23:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T02:23:02","slug":"matt-michel-the-goat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/?p=62916","title":{"rendered":"Matt: Michel the GOAT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, <a href=\"https:\/\/iterativewonders.com\/2025\/11\/25\/michel-valdrighi-the-coder-whose-code-never-went-silent\/\">Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I had to leave a comment, because Michel\u2019s story is not well-known.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn\u2019t just free but gave you Freedom was a radical idea that made people look at you funny. He showed me that code could be poetry, that beauty in simplicity is harder to achieve than complexity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mikelittle.com\/\">Mike Little<\/a> and I met hanging out on the <a href=\"https:\/\/sourceforge.net\/projects\/cafelog\/\">b2\/cafelog Sourceforge<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Freenode\">Freenode IRC<\/a> channel, both drawn in by what Michel had created. It all started on a little island called <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Corsica\">Corsica<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don\u2019t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent. I had to leave a comment, because Michel\u2019s &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/?p=62916\">Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=62916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=62916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=62916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bowlingquest.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=62916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}